There are moon and sun, but where are the cornfields?
Photo: dpa
Temur Babluani was previously known in this country as a filmmaker; in 1993 he won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale for his film “The Sun of the Waking.” In the broadest sense, it is about generosity and forgiveness in Soviet-era Georgia. The screenwriter, director and actor, who has lived in Paris for more than 20 years, is a star on Georgia’s cultural scene. In 2018 he published his first novel and received the Georgian Saba Prize for the best debut. This is now also available in German in a sensitive translation by Rachel Gratzfeld and is highly recommended.
Tbilisi 1968. Jude is 17, the son of a shoemaker and drunkard whose wife ran away. »As soon as he finished work, he downed a bottle of vodka at the grocery store next door with the other drunks and then staggered up the stairs to our apartment, dragging bags with him. In the pockets were his tools and shoes that needed mending.”
Dschude is just finishing school, loves Manushaka and remains loyal to his friend Chaim, even as this smart boy from the Jewish quarter plunges deeper and deeper into criminal adventures. Things are rough in the city; You’re in a mess faster than you can steal a pair of jeans from the clothesline. To protect Chaim, Jude undertakes two murders, and an odyssey through Soviet prison camps begins.
Babluani describes the following decades at a rapid pace, breathlessly edited like a thriller – until a bitter-sweet end long after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Sometimes the crazy sleigh ride stops, a spotlight shines on a remote and spartan backdrop and: we are right in the middle of it, suffering and feverishly with our Dschude, dreaming of Manushaka or a hole in the fence, a well-buried treasure of gold or the next snowstorm. It’s extremely exciting, dark and light, kitschy and dramatic, it’s a prison book, a house of the dead book, Dostoyevsky in a modern way.
“There was a fairly well-equipped library in the camp. I had already read more than thirty books about Eastern Siberia, mostly reports from hunters and former camp inmates. These memoirs were very similar to each other. However, Yermak’s conquest of Siberia greatly amazed me. I couldn’t imagine how six hundred men had managed to take over such a huge area. (…) I realized that I, along with several billion beings like me, i.e. people, had no special place in the cosmos. If we disappeared, nothing would change.”
And yet there are grotesque twists of fate and surprising encounters. It is a book about love, friendship and curiosity. A curiosity that can lead to freedom, back to Manushaka and Chaim.
Temur Babluani: Sun, Moon and Cornfield. A.d. George. v. Rachel Gratzfeld. Voland & Quist, 546 p., born €28.
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